America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, this book brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.--From publisher description.

In 1978, Greil Marcus asked twenty other writers on rock - including Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Ellen Willis, Simon Frith, and Robert Christgau - a question: what one rock and roll album would you take to a desert island? The resulting essays were collected in Stranded, twenty passionate declarations that, appropriately, affirmed the solitary and obsessive activity that rock listening had become. Here are salutes, elegies, thank-you notes, and love letters to records such as The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet, The Ramones' Rocket to Russia, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Something Else by the Kinks, and out-of-print classics by the Ronettes, Little Willie John, and Huey "Piano" Smith; the whole is supplemented with Marcus's own invaluably annotated fifty-page discography, a "Treasure Island" of rock and roll. Stranded remains a classic of rock and roll literature, and perhaps the best possible answer to the question: what one rock and roll book would you take to a desert island?